If you haven't already heard about it, I thought you might be interested to know about a 11-part series of quarter-hour programmes coming up on Radio 4 F.M. Details on the web are not complete yet, but I get the impression that the series is running every week day for the 11 (or some webpages seem to suggest 10) parts

A Cause for Caroling

New series. Choral conductor Jeremy Summerly traces the origins and development of the Christmas carol tradition in Britain. In the first edition, the presenter finds out which carol practices have survived to the present day, before examining the musical and lyrical content of what he believes was the first festive song to be written in the English language.

More details can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03kpnk3

The first broadcast will be on Monday, 9th December, 1-45 p.m.

Then, on Friday, 13th December, 1-45 p.m.

The Ghosts of the West Gallery

Jeremy Summerly visits Dorchester in Dorset, where Thomas Hardy captured the carol tradition that had matured through the 17th and 18th centuries, but which faced extinction into the 19th. He also explains the origins of fuguing carols and why their days were almost numbered as well. Along with folk musician Tim Laycock, Jeremy gets to see the carol manuscripts from which Hardy's great-grandfather played and sang on Christmas night in 1800.

For future reference, I'd not bother with this one: he failed to explain two of the roots of the carol in celebration and in the rondelli, the monastic round dances tracing the continental labyrinths found in so many churches. True, he mentions the later degeneration into ring-dances, but suggests there is a pagan origin to them, which is nowhere documented in anything other than some of the symbology in the words, often of folk origins and much later. A stronger case can be made - and he did not - that they may be derivative from dances in the Orthodox Church derived from Jewish tradition. In his discussion of the death of West Quire music, he presumes everyone knows all about the Oxford Movement and fails to mention the chief medium of its impact, placing organs in the Quire gallery, happily playing later organ arrangements of earlier quire melodies. A superficial mess, in other words.